Comments on: Study shows governments' open-source embrace

Dozens of government proposals arise, but never get off the ground.

[EricBaenen]

Proprietary software not all bad

Speaking as someone who works with the US government - proprietary software isn't bad - what's bad is making the data file formats proprietary - so I can't switch to another vendor's product without a lot of pain. The data file formats should be public domain for any software used by the US government. That's what worries so many of us about Microsoft - before long, and with many of the 'advancements' coming down the line - Microsoft is going to be in an unprecedented position to control our access to our own data. You don't pay Microsoft's software rent - you may not have access to your own data.

[EricBaenen]

In favor of open source

On the other hand there is a lot to be said of open source software in the government - on our gov project we replaced an entire system of Microsoft Windows Advanced servers, MS SQL servers, Exchange servers, etc. with Linux (Debian for stability), Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, PHP, Postfix/Qmail, Jabber, etc. We had no change in system admin staff (just a little reshuffling and retraining) and it saves us many tens of thousands of dollars a year in license fees, and it has greatly improved our security, flexibility, reliability and maintainability.

[alek_nedic]

a lot of pain

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